How endangered has the concept of privacy become in the age of social networking? Not too long ago, it used to be that we could generally agree upon on social norms governing the boundary between our private and public selves. But as Dave Eggers explores in The Circle, his engrossing fourth novel, powerful Silicon Valley corporations such as Google and Facebook have corroded our broad agreement of what privacy entails.

The Circle, a page-turner that arrives just one year after the National Book Award finalist A Hologram for the King, continues the run of socially minded works that have been Eggers calling card since 2006’s What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. However, whereas that book was joined by 2009’s Zeitoun and last year’s Hologram to form a universally acclaimed series of hybrids that blurred the lines between fiction and non-fiction as they explored contemporary diaspora politics, The Circle is the author’s first unequivocally American and fictional novel since his spotty sophomore effort, 2002’s You Shall Know our Velocity!.

Eggers is especially well suited to bend the message-driven genre into strong stories. On and off the page, he’s one of the most engaged writers in American letters. With literary initiatives such as McSweeney’s publishing and The Believer magazine, and his student charities 826 Valencia and ScholarMatch, Eggers is no longer the admired young writer who leapt to international celebrity on the back of his bestselling 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Thirteen years on, he is a writer who has actively defined his generation and its concerns, opening up possibilities for others along the way.

In The Circle, Eggers puts America’s next generation front and centre. Like many people her age who are arriving to a depleted post-recessionary workforce, 24-year-old Mae Holland is over-educated, saddled with intimidating student debt, and under-employed. With some string pulled by her university friend Annie, she lucks into an entry-level job at The Circle, a Google-style corporation that employs more than 10,000 under-30s at its sprawling Silicon Valley campus.

At first, Holland can’t believe her luck. The Circle offers everything she could want in an employer. Her entry-level job pays north of $60,000, the campus actively encourages fusing work and play to promote a company lifestyle, and she’s told to expect promotions sooner rather than later. The Circle’s luxury health plan even expands to cover her father, who suffers from MS and has had his nest egg drained as he fights his own insurance company for the payments he needs for treatment.

But all these benefits come at a cost that Eggers deftly teases out as Holland comes to rely on The Circle’s unparalleled offerings. Upon arrival at the company, her personal phone, pad, and laptop are replaced by top-of-the-line Circle gear. On top of her regular workload in Customer Experience, Holland discovers that she’s expected to maintain a high social networking presence as part of her job.

Institutionalized socializing consumes Mae’s life, especially after the company brings it to her attention that she’s not social enough. The company’s medical plan requires her to wear a bracelet that allows the company to monitor her vital signs and whereabouts at all times. An intimate episode with another Circler turns creepy when she learns he’s been secretly filming them because he feels entitled to view the moment from a different perspective afterwards. The Circle has deeper motives, we soon discover. The company is cutting a path to innovation in a future world that has no privacy, where everything is monitored and no sliver of knowledge is lost. Privacy is a hostile inefficiency, and Circlers are expected to set the example.

Eggers executes the deepening implications of Mae’s predicament in one of his most linear and plain-spoken stories to date. For all its issues, The Circle is an openly inviting read that eschews many of the more literary acrobatics that characterized the author’s early works. Neither the language nor the novel’s temperament feels flashy, and as a result its 500 pages fly by. Because Eggers’ imagination has, in its way, circled home after a run of internationally set pieces, The Circle is one of Eggers most accessible stories. Given its sharp engagement with the pressing social issues of the moment, it only adds to the author’s stature as one of America’s most outwardly minded, thought-provoking, and important writers.

Dimitri Nasrallah is an author and regular contributor to the Star’s book pages.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.